Blue Hour vs Recto MD

Blue Hour turns time into light: a sun sinks toward the horizon as your timer runs, so you can feel how much is left without reading a number. Built kindly for ADHD and time-blindness, calm enough for classrooms and kids. No account, no ads, no streaks. Free forever, with a tip jar in Settings. RAISE THE SUN Drag the sun up to set your time, one minute to three hours, with soft detents you can feel. Prefer numbers? Tap the readout for a keypad. Three preset chips keep your rituals one tap away. THE SETTLING DUSK As the last light falls, the sky deepens and the screen dims a few gentle stops. At zero: two slow breaths of glow, a soft haptic, and an optional two-note chime. No alarm slam. Ever. THE LIGHT FOLLOWS YOU A Live Activity keeps the sinking sun on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island. An optional nudge can tell you when time is up, even if you have looked away. Off by default. CYCLES, GENTLY Pomodoro in Blue Hour's language: work while the sun sets, then the break is a sunrise. The sky returns to morning, and the next round starts when you do. Rounds are counted in little suns, never quotas. START FROM ANYWHERE A Home Screen widget starts your usual timer in one tap. Siri and Shortcuts can start, pause, and resume without opening the app. FOR CLASSROOMS One tap opens the big display: a wall-sized countdown calm enough for a whole room, with a classroom preset set from one to twenty minutes. A QUIET LINE EACH DAWN Every day the idle sky carries one line from 412 public-domain quotations. Seneca, Thoreau, Lao Tzu, old proverbs. One per day. No feed, no push, no hustle. CALM BY CONSTRUCTION • Optional halfway and final-minute cues • Keeps the screen awake while the light falls, if you want • Wall-clock accurate: background it, come back, the light agrees • VoiceOver, Reduced Motion, and Dynamic Type are first-class FREE FOREVER Every feature, free. No premium tier, no subscription. If Blue Hour earns a place on your Home Screen, there is a tip jar in Settings. It unlocks nothing. PRIVATE BY ARCHITECTURE No account. No analytics. No tracking. Blue Hour makes zero network calls, and its App Store privacy label is "Data Not Collected," the rare kind that means exactly what it says. The light keeps track for you.

Recto MD opens a Markdown file and gets out of the way. It is a reader, not an editor. There is nothing to save, nothing to sync, and nothing to lose. You pick a file and it is on screen, typeset and ready to read. TYPOGRAPHY FIRST The reading column, the leading and the vertical rhythm are the product. Body text resizes from 13 to 24 points with a pinch, the column measure has three widths, and the page is laid out so a long document stays comfortable rather than merely legible. RENDERS WHAT YOUR DOCUMENTS ACTUALLY CONTAIN - CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown: tables, task lists, strikethrough, autolinks, footnotes - GitHub-style alerts: NOTE, TIP, IMPORTANT, WARNING, CAUTION - Mermaid diagrams, loaded only when a document has one - Syntax-highlighted fenced code blocks, with a copy button - Wide tables scroll inside the reading column, so the page itself never scrolls sideways FIND YOUR WAY AROUND An outline is generated from the document's headings: a sheet on iPhone, a sidebar on iPad that also holds your recent documents. Search inside a document with a live match count and step through the matches. Recents remembers where you stopped reading and puts you back there. IT UPDATES WHILE YOU READ Change the file somewhere else and the document updates in place - same scroll position, no flash, no reload button to hunt for. Turn that off and you get a "File changed" tap target instead. THEMES A clean light theme, a warm paper tint, and a warm dark theme that is not pure black. Switch by hand or follow the system. OFFLINE, AND PRIVATE BY CONSTRUCTION The app makes no network requests at all. No account, no sign-in, no analytics, no tracking, nothing collected. Your documents are files on your device or in your iCloud Drive, and that is where they stay. BUILT FOR THE PLATFORM Dynamic Type through to the accessibility sizes, VoiceOver reading real document structure, Increase Contrast, Reduce Motion and Reduce Transparency are all honoured. With a hardware keyboard, Open, Find, Find Next, Reload, the text-size commands and Settings are all one keystroke away, and the Command-hold sheet lists them.